Some of the new generation of handheld electronic devices include both a camera and a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver chipset. Examples of these handheld electronic devices include GPS-enabled wireless communications devices, PDA Pocket PCs or tablets, GPS-enabled camera-phones or smart phones, and GPS-enabled cameras. These devices can be made “location-aware” by virtue of a GPS receiver that is either embedded as a GPS chipset or connected externally, e.g. a Bluetooth™—enabled GPS puck.
The combination of GPS and camera features enables “geotagging” (or “geocoding”) of digital photographs, i.e. tagging digital photos with geographical information indicative of the location at which the photo was taken. For example, the geotagging may involve appending coordinates of longitude and latitude to a metadata tag, e.g. an Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) tag, that is associated with the digital photo. Other forms of data (notes, blogs, audio clips, video clips, etc.) can also be geotagged in a similar fashion.
Once photos (or other data) are geotagged, the user can, at a later date, manually annotate the photos (or other data) with textual descriptions such as “Dad's 50TH birthday”, “My trip to Hawaii 2007”, etc. However, manually annotating (i.e. manually labelling) the photos (or other data) is time-consuming as this requires the user to retrieve the position coordinates from the metadata file associated with each geotagged photo (or other type of data set) and then use that set of coordinates (and possibly also the timestamp) to figure out where and in what context the photo was taken. Even with modern tools such as reverse geocoding, annotating a large batch of photos (or other sets of geotagged data) can be a very laborious process.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.